Software-defined datacentres demystified

The term software-defined datacentre (SDDC) rose to prominence this year during annual
virtualisation conference VMworld 2012 with VMware touting it as the next best thing in IT.

A software-defined
datacentre is an IT facility where the elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage,
CPU and security – are virtualised and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of
the entire infrastructure is entirely automated by software.

In his keynote at VMworld Europe 2012, VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger described today’s
approach to the datacentre as “a museum of IT”, comprising legacy hardware and mainframes. “We need
to make all aspects of infrastructure flexible,” said Gelsinger.

The software-defined datacentre was among the hot topics at Storage and Networking World (SNW)
Europe 2012 in October. According to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the future needs more automation.
“To put it frankly, you can’t make money with hardware,” a spokesman for HDS added.

Related articles on datacentre virtualisation

Rob Jenkins, European director for VMware advisory services, claims that building largescale
datacentres from standard high-volume servers was inefficient and complex, both for cloud service
providers and large enterprises.

“Besides, it is not very reliable, which is why SDDC is the future,” Jenkins says. The
software-defined approach has driven people to think differently about how we build
networks (wide-area networks and network fabrics in the datacentre), bind them with applications
and manage them, says Nicolas Fischbach, director of network and IT platform strategy and
architecture at Colt.

A big part of VMware’s SDDC strategy is its revised vCloud Suite – unveiled at VMworld – which
includes technologies to provide datacentre managers with software-defined computing capabilities,
software-defined
storage and networking elements as well as management and cloud components.

VMware’s strategy for a fully automated datacentre can be traced back to July when it bought
networking company Nicira for more than $1bn. Nicira was a software-defined networking supplier
offering multi-hypervisor network infrastructure, enabling users to run the network from a software
perspective and remove the control from the hardware elements.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to networking in which control is decoupled
from hardware and given to a software application called a controller.
Adding Nicira is complementary to VMware’s SDDC strategy, says independent IT consultant Enrico
Signoretti.

VMware is not alone in cashing in on softwaredefined network and software-defined storage to
power an SDDC. Citrix acquired NetScaler with similar intentions and suppliers such as Xsigo and
Oracle are developing automation capabilities in their services to power an SDDC, Signoretti
says.

“I feel Microsoft will announce something very soon around SDDC,” Signoretti adds.
Software-defined datacentres and cloud computing. As software becomes sophisticated, building in
more management capabilities, the role of hardware in a cloud-like datacentre is shrinking. Storage
products are already software-backed.

The same is true of networking. Many networking products have a software layer, says Andrew
Mauro, a virtualisation expert and VMware User Group (VMU G) Italy’s co-founder and board
member.

“But what’s interesting about VMware’s SDDC proposition is that it will bring all the software
pieces together into your infrastructure,” Mauro says. “Two years ago, integrating storage, network
and security products was very difficult, but today, a software-defined datacentre could make that
a reality,” he says. VMware’s vCloud Suite brings together what customers need to build, operate
and manage a cloud infrastructure – virtualisation, automation, policy-based provisioning, disaster
recovery, and applications and operations management – says Mauro.

Potentially, an SDDC implementation could allow servers and other hardware to be shut down or
run at lower power levels, which has implications for energy use, according to Ali. Some experts
see SDDC as a more secure option to cloud. “SDDCs provide organisations with their own private
cloud, allowing them to have far more control over hosted data,” says Tim Chambers, chief
technology officer and co-founder of Data City Exchange. When data is stored in an SDDC,
organisations can have on-demand access, rather than requesting the cloud provider for
permission.

“This is far more flexible and it means enterprises have the power to access their data when
they need it,” adds Chambers. It also means an organisation can decide the level of security rather
than relying on the security put in place by a cloud hosting provider.

“More often than not, CIOs are looking for an efficient, robust business function to be
delivered. However, far too often, they move first, and think later, to the detriment of process
delivery and more critically, the user experience,” says Ali.

Architecting software-defined environments implies rethinking IT processes such as automation,
orchestration, metering and billing, and executing on operating model step changes (such as service
delivery, service activation and service assurance).

Upskilling for SDDC is only one aspect of the evolution needed to deliver on the promise of
applying flexibility to networks and datacentres, says Colt’s Fischbach. It starts with the
understanding of customer requirements and how to translate them into a system and a commercial and
technical service wrap. Executives need experience
across networks, systems and applications to operate SDDC and there cannot be single
skills/operations teams silos, says Fischbach.

But some see SDDC as beyond the usual “service” or “dynamic” level of the datacentre maturity
models, at a “visionary level”. This puts SDDC on the post-cloud leading edge for many CIOs and
could take up to 10 years before we see it hit the mainstream, says Ali.

And as enterprises continue using legacy products such as mainframes, SDDC will co-exist with
old datacentres for a very long time, adds Signoretti. But even for CIOs who want to adopt newer IT
models such as SDDC, the road is not easy. “Licensing is one of the biggest challenges of moving to
an infrastructure heavily driven by software,” says Signoretti. “Even in today’s highly virtualised
world, we follow an archaic software licensing model. If we are talking about a software-defined
facility, we need better, efficient and user-friendly licensing models,” he says. In addition,
there are challenges around storage and networking components – two of the biggest elements of
SDDC. But storage and networking virtualisation are not at the same maturity level as server
virtualisation.

“There are standards on top of Openflow for SDN, but nothing SDDC-centric is fully mature,
meaning you cannot move an SDDC to a different toolkit,” says Ali, warning users of supplier
lock-in.

Enterprises must be mindful of other challenges too. Legacy applications could fail if they are
simply dropped in without taking into account latency, suitability to distributed architecture and
fault tolerance at application level.

Besides, none of the basics of physics or economics will ever go away. “Energy will still be
finite, marginally discontinuous in supply and increasingly expensive, and you do not want to
launch a new SDDC and trip a circuit breaker,” says Ali.

The less standardised (and hence less private cloud-friendly) the customer’s requirement and the
faster the change, the more adoptive the customer will be. “In simple terms, if distributed, varied
technology and rapid change are a big part of generating revenue, you’ll be ready sooner,” says
Ali.

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